My decent, budgetary HTPC

[Aquarius]

Hi all,
finally I decided to present my decent, budgetary HTPC and like to share some of my experiences from my HTPC- hobby. Yes hobby, you must see this as a hobby, donn't count the hours, donn't count the money.

My HTPC machine with MP is now in full proper, operation in the living room since around 2 years. My overall HTPC project lasts now around 4 1/2 years from the very first beginning of MP up to now. You can imagine that there were lots of frustations in between, but that's all forgotten now thanks to the MP- devs team. Hence multiple donations to the team are made.

The selection of hard- and software was mainly driven by usage habits, limited budget and ... WAF, resulting in these assumptions:

• affordable, robust, reliable and well proven hardware. No hassle with the very latest technology. I'm in software IT business far over 20 years now and one lesson I learned: "Don't use 1.0"
• cheap, widespread spare parts
• no HDTV, also not expected in a foreseeable future.
• usage of existing CRT- TV until the end of its lifetime. No LCD/Plasma TV before 2012 in our household due to retentions regarding the technical future of TV. See also remarks further down.
• no (HD) DVD as DVDs don't play a role in our watching habits. (Except my beloved 'SUPERDRUMMING'- Music DVDs, therefore a reasonable AV/speaker combination was needed.)
• Public- TV recordings from analogue cable. No Pay-TV ever. DVB-T perhaps added this year, but as DVB-T2 is already under discussion, perhaps wait for that. Another point goes to "don't buy 1.0"
• MP3/OGG- Music
• Internet- TV and -radio
• Videos in various codec and formats as gifted from our son. (From sources we do not want to know anything about ... )

Hardware:

Mobo/CPU: ASUS A7N8X E- Deluxe, Athlon XP 2500
LCD: HD44780 compatible 4 lines standard via LPT
PSU: no-name 450W with 120mm fan.
Video: PVR350
VGA: Radeon 9800 XXL, RGB- out on board with separate Plug
VGA to TV : RGB to SCART
Remote: Logitech 785 + MCE European version
Keyboard: MCE
DVD- Burner:BENQ ???
HDD: WD 360GB
Audio: AC97 SPDIF passthrough to a Kenwood AV
Case: Silverstone La Scala SST-LC13 B

AV: Kenwood KRF6030D
Speakers: Teufel Concept M

You may have noticed that this is not the very latest hardware. Reason is that the project started some years ago and all that hardware was found in my spare part storage. Robustness and reliability is more important than features, cause that increases the WAF.

Software:
OS: XPSP2, down stripped.
PCI latency tool to solve some stutter issues.

MP: 0.2.3 + SVN;
no upgrade to TVE3 ever expected. Perhaps with MP II.

Codecs: NVIDIA for TV, MPV for DVD, MPA for all Audio

Plug-ins:

* Powerscheduler
* External Display
* Wwitv
* Watchdog
* MyStatus
* Videoeditor
* Shoutcast directory


- some VB- SQL scripts to add own recordings to MP- database directly according to self defined rules.
- Scheduled scripts to run regular maintenance tasks like WEBEPG, Defrag, Backup etc. while MP is running. Thus
zero downtime of MP during maintenance.

Case mod:

Case selection is more than 4 years ago. Tried 3 different cases but at the time of decision, good HTPC cases where just evolving and the good ones were very expensive.

It ended up with a simple, good „moddable“ „Silverstone La Scala SST-LC13“ case. I removed the complete interior including fans, closed both back vent hole and put noise absorber „carpet“ where ever possible.

To protect against ‚big‘ dust, all inbound air holes are covered with splitted filters from a kitchen extractor hood. Very cheap and effective.


Cooling and venting

This was the greatest challenge: Make it cool and quiet with standard components. A contradiction which is hard to solve, resulting in very long tests with objective temperature and subjective noise measurements. It ended up with 7(!) fans and low noise.

The fans are driven by an array of 4 * LM317 controllers to supply power at any voltage range at costs of around 5 €.

• Case Bottom

: 'dremeled' a 10cm hole and mounted a 120mm Papst fan inward decoupled with rubber pins. Voltage lowered to 8V, no noticeable noise.

• Inside

one 6cm Papst fan running at 5V blowing over the heat sink of the PVR350. This reduced the temperature at the bottom of the heat sink of the PVR from 58° to 37°.

• Harddisk

60 mm fan (12V @5V ) below the harddisk for cooling, taped with simple rubber strips. Again simple and cheap. By that means it reduced the HD temp. around 4° (measured with some SMART tool). As the disc is not in the direct flow of fresh air, it deserved this extra cooling.

• Northbridge Cooler

40mm fan (12V @5V) from a defective ATI VGA mounted on a bended PCI slot cover. Reduced the temperature at the bottom of the cooler from around 55° to 39°C.

• CPU

AC super Silent Rev.2, temp. controlled. The fan is again decoupled from the frame, as not the air noise was a problem, but resonances with the case/ board. Simple plastic strips to guide hot CPU air to the PSU fan. The Mobo layout is not optimal here as the CPU is mounted crossways to the air flow.

• PSU

: 'no- name' standard PSU with 120 mm fan. PSU case modded to decouple fan with rubber shields. Removed fan grill to ease air flow.

• VGA

the most weird cooling you might have ever seen ! But cheap and VERY effective: Killed an Arctic Cooling AC3, as it was too loud, by sawing off the fan side completely. Mounted a 24 V industry fan from a SUN SPARC workstation on a metal frame. Frame mounted to the AC cooler. The frame is covered with 1mm plastic folio and put into shape with a hot air blower. Fan decoupled with rubber sticks, now running at 9V. Nearly inaudible.

Temperature result:

Inside case temperature measured with a external sensor (not with the mobo- sensors ) around 5° to 8° C higher than surrounding temperature.

I know that lots of the fans e.g. on the northbridge, over the PVR or below the disc might be redundant. But my personal experience is that over- temperature or constant changing temperatures (ON/OFF) is killing computer devices perhaps because of mechanical tensions in the chips. So I tried to keep these temperature differences as low as possible. Also I could recycle some spare parts from old PCs.

Conclusion and Remarks

Please find attached some photographic shots of interior and the surrounding. It’s neither high design inside nor outside, also cabling and binding could be better, but the housing is closed, so who cares ?

Lifecycle and future expectations

The expected lifetime of this machine is around 8 years. Around 2 years are already gone, so another 6 are to follow which is the absolute end of the analogue TV era, not a day earlier.

I try to adapt to the digital TV future as late as possible because my very personal guess is that TV future regarding technical and content aspect still contains some uncovered bad surprises for consumers. Some indication pointing in that direction are the HDDVD desaster, the abandoning of the remaining HD channels here in Germany or the discussion about DVB-T2. Additionally I heard lots of frustrations from people buying flat TVs and having the "same picture as before".

One insecurity I see for the future, is the way TV broadcasters apply HDCP for their content protection. HDMI is nice, but it contains HDCP. I guess, the resulting consequences of HDCP have not yet arrived in the mind of consumers.

Slightly off topic, for sure. Just a few second thoughts.



Hope someone gets some inspiration. Comments welcome.

Best regards to the team
/Gerd

Oooh, by the way,

when watching the photo from the living room you may have noticed a weird device on the mid right:

That's a vinyl record player, for those who donn't remember or never heard of such devices .

On pressure of my wife, I resurrected it and what shall I say, didn't regret it ! Shame on me that I stored it on the attic over the years. I must admit, that it is a big difference if you bring music to life with a vinyl player or just press some knobs on a remote. But I guess that is - again - some other discussion ...

[BennieBoy]

Hi,

I like cooling ducts too :-)
INSIDE

Greetz,
Ben

[Aquarius]

Hi Ben,
have to admit clearly , yours inside looks more professional !

You suck off the hot air, don't you ?
Interesting approach.


Regards
/Gerd